


Death Roll

by SylvanWitch



Series: In the Ruins [2]
Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: AU after OotP, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 14:27:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Herein be the naming of the dead and some comfort for the comfortless.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death Roll

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published in 2004 at RestrictedSection.org. This series is my first fanfiction endeavor.

"Abercrombie, Euan?"

"Dead."

"Bell, Katie?"

"Dead."

"Brown, Lavender?"

"Dead."

"Creevey, Colin?"

"Dead."

"Creevey, Dennis?"

"---. Unknown."

A pause invited an elaboration that did not come, a pause that lengthened out into measured breaths. The rustle of robes as chests rose and fell became a silken thunder in the room, tense with silence.

Finally, Dumbledore spoke, "Explain, please, Severus."

The Potions Master glanced up from beneath lowered brows, not furtively but with a grimness that bordered on contempt.

"There was a leg, just a knee and thigh, really, in close proximity to the elder Creevey boy's body. It may have been the younger brother. I cannot be sure," his voice like a millstone grinding out each heavy word.

Dumbledore had the grace to look horrified anew, though so much horror had been spoken at that battered oaken table already that the air fairly moaned with the voices of the dead. The stench of death seemed to permeate the laden air, dripping off the walls to flutter up the pluming candle flames like lost spirits. To Snape's left a figure stirred, and he caught out of the corner of his eye the now-familiar sight of Molly's red hair curtaining her face and shaking with suppressed sobs. Snape didn't turn to her but kept his eyes fixed on Dumbledore, who was recovered sufficiently to lift his parchment list and continue:

"Finnigan, Seamus?"

"Dead."

"Granger, Hermione."

"Dead." Snape's voice was icy and still, like the deepest well-water, unmoved and unmoving.

A gasp from across the table, and from beside him a squeak of suppressed anguish.

Dumbledore said, "Molly, perhaps you should—"

But the woman would have none of his solicitousness.

"I will hear this, Albus," she said, her voice shaking but the tone determined. Albus had heard it often enough around a crowded dinner table to know that she would not be dissuaded from her purpose, so he continued without further comment.

"Jordan, Lee?"

"Unknown, but likely dead."

Another raised eyebrow from the inquisitor, and from the former Death Eater, "The skin was charred beyond clear recognition, but I'm fairly certain..." Snape's account was cut off preemptively by a gagging noise from his left, then the hurried scraping of chair legs and a rush of robes as Molly raced from the room to be noisily sick in the hall bathroom.

Masking the sound, Dumbledore went on, his voice heavier now with each word, as though they were dragged from him by mere force of a waning will.

"Longbottom, Neville?"

"Dead." No inflection on the part of Snape, whose cold voice had not once wavered in the naming of the dead.

"Patil, Parvati?"

"Dead."

There was a long and painful pause as Dumbledore gathered his strength. His face had gone ashen, and his hand was visibly shaking, the scroll making a rustling noise against the table that reminded Snape of rats' feet scurrying on stone.

Finally...

"Potter, Harry?"

"Unknown."

"Are you sure?" The words rushed from the wizard with all the force of disbelieving hope, and Snape could not help but add a tinge of warmth to his otherwise dispassionate voice.

"Yes, Albus. Black transformed and sniffed the ruins for hours. We dug anywhere he would have been likely to be at that hour, and we found no evidence that he was among the dead."

The old wizard looked every year his age as he lowered his care-ravaged face towards the table, hiding his expression from Snape and exhaling noisily, as though he had been holding his breath for days. Perhaps he had. Snape had been given only enough time to clean the worst of the filth off of himself, cover his emaciated frame with a robe borrowed from Shacklebolt, and eat a bowl of tepid stew full of stringy beef and dubious vegetables that, nevertheless, had been the best meal Snape was sure he had ever eaten. Then, while Sirius was left to recover his equilibrium and have a proper bath, Snape was ordered, albeit gently, to the kitchen of the Muggle summer home that they were using as their temporary base of operations. He was informed that Shacklebolt and Tonks were patrolling the area and Hagrid had gone into the nearby woods to see about procuring some fresh meat for breakfast.

The house was far enough removed from the village where Snape and Black had been discovered that any lights from charmed candles or smoke from hearth fires would be undetectable. Furthermore, the water and bathroom facilities had not been winterized, a boon for the exhausted and bedraggled band but also a fact that gave them all pause, but which, given the circumstances, they had to overlook. At the moment, they hadn't a plan, so this place was as good as any, even if they might be surprised by Muggle owners stopping in to spend a cold Winter's night at their vacation home.

After a time, Dumbledore raised his head to once again look over his spectacles at the parchment scroll of Gryffindor names. Since Snape and Black had been focused on finding Potter, they had not searched the Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw quarters, or what was left of them, and Snape had reported with a strange mixture of pride and scorn that the Slytherin dungeons had been entirely empty, "with the exception of the late Draco Malfoy." Dumbledore had visibly started in his chair when he heard "late," but he did not interrupt the Head of Slytherin, settling instead for a sharp gaze and one upraised eyebrow that would have been more comfortable on Snape's own brow.

Without pausing or acknowledging Dumbledore's insistent, though silent, question, Snape recounted the state of the Hospital Wing and the deaths of Poppy Pomfrey and Sibyll Trelawney, as well as the students who had been fortunate enough to be killed while they slept in their hard-mattressed infirmary beds, presumably through the agent of a blanket Killing Curse, as none had seemed distressed or harmed in any way prior to their deaths. "Susan Bones, Terry Boot, and Rose Zeller." Snape delivered the names as though reading from a shopping list. Dumbledore had shaken his head with profound sadness and murmured, "Such a terrible, terrible waste of life." Snape had ignored that, too.

"Spinnet, Alicia?"

"Dead."

"Thomas, Dean?"

"Dead."

"Weas—"

Molly chose that moment to return to the kitchen. She stopped suddenly behind Snape's chair as she heard her own name cut in half.

"Albus, please---."

"Molly, I really think it would be best if you were not in the room for this."

"Albus, I must hear! I have to know!"

The older wizard exchanged a long and measured look with Snape, who gave the minutest shrug of his shoulders, as if to suggest that it were neither here nor there to him. Dumbledore clearly desired greater assurance that what the woman would hear would not break her, but Snape would not give him that grace. Let the Headmaster bear the weight of those wounds, as well, though Snape, bitterly, with a glance at Dumbledore's comfortable robes and white beard, barely sullied with dust or sweat. Albus only nodded, his lips a thin, grim line, his expression an exemplar of deep disquiet.

"Weasley, Fred."

Molly was standing behind her own chair now, gripping the top of the ladderback with whitened knuckles, a fierce concentration folding her features into etched lines and diffuse shadows.

"Sit down, Molly."

Both Dumbledore and Molly Weasley looked momentarily startled, having expected only the stock words from Snape. Then, as though they could read Snape's mind, both paled. Dumbledore gave an almost inaudible, "Oh, dear," and Molly Weasley groaned, her face crumbling like the tower walls, her head shaking in an unconscious and fervent denial.

"I don't want to have to clean your blood off the floor when you collapse and crack open your skull," he said, venom dripping from every fanged word.

Dumbledore gasped, began, "Now, Severus, that's—"

But Molly beat him to it: "You cold-hearted, Voldemort-loving, greasy, shite-eating bastard! How dare you speak to me like that! How dare you speak to me at all? You should be writhing under a permanent Cruciatus in some snakepit instead of sitting here with decent folk. You never liked us, Snape, and I know that in your heart you harbor nothing but glee for every Weasley death. Hell, you're probably aching to celebrate the death of all the Gryffindors! But let me tell you something, you evil son-of-a-bitch, you WILL NOT SPEAK ILL OF MY CHILDREN! You speak their names with respect, or so help me all the gods, I will curse you with Cruciatus myself and laugh while you scream!"

Severus gave the nastiest of smiles, as though he were contemplating the suffocation of puppies for pleasure, though underneath that there was a smug satisfaction at having roused Molly from her pathetic weakness and made her spitting mad. Neither witch nor elder wizard noticed the subtle undersmirk, however, and Snape continued in a tone so utterly devoid of feeling that it could have been sounded by a Muggle automaton,

"I cannot say. It was either Fred or George. There was no way to be certain."

"Then one of them might be alive?" It was a mother's prayer more than a question.

"I could not tell you. There were many places in which we found only unidentifiable remains. Nearest the detonation site, there were only—fragments. In all likelihood, both of them were there. The one we identified as a twin was wearing Quidditch gear and had a broom with him."

Molly whimpered and sank to her knees behind the chair, her hands falling bonelessly to her sides, as though detached from her body. Dumbledore gave Snape an unreadable look and then stood hurriedly and came around the table to help Molly up and into the chair. From beside the Potions Master, Dumbledore said, voice urgent but soft,

"And the others, Severus?"

"Ginny and Ron are both dead."

A moment of immeasurable silence.

Then the softest of whimpers, like a wounded dove at first, but that rose up the register of pain, through grief, beyond anguish, until it erupted into keening, a shrieking, ululating wail of utter and annihilating despair. Molly began to rock back and forth in her chair, in time with the rise and fall of her shriek, and lifted her hands to her head, pulling fistfuls of red hair out by the roots slowly and deliberately. Snape was reminded of the Weasley girl's shock of flaming red hair, which he'd lifted from the ruins like a war prize. Albus tried to stop the frantic woman, grabbing her hands to still them, but she twisted away and came up out of her seat so suddenly that the crown of her head cracked Albus in the chin and lower lip. He stumbled back, releasing her , and brought one shaking hand to his lip, which was dripping blood in a sinuous rivulet down his snowy beard.

Now you're not so clean, thought Snape, but he said nothing, just watched, expressionless, as Dumbledore bled and Molly ran from the room, still keening and tearing her hair. Then, he heard a noise, a distant cry like an echo of the anguished woman. He said sharply, "Where's Black, Albus?"

The Headmaster, still dazed by the blow he had taken, focused only after great effort on the Potions Master, as though he had to consider his pupils before he could command them.

"He's in the en suite bathroom off the master bedroom."

Snape gave a curt nod and stood up fluidly, pushing back his chair in one long, smooth motion, the sound of the chair legs against the floor like the cry of cemetery crows. He brushed by Dumbledore without a word, without so much as a glance, and headed for the staircase and the sounds from above.

Though he had not been permitted to bathe and change upstairs, having been forced to settle for a damp cloth at the sink in the half-bath in the hall off of the kitchen, Snape knew where the master bathroom was by the sounds coming from it. Though having faded from the howling he had heard in the kitchen below, the desperate cries were still clearly audible even through the heavy oak doors of the bedroom and the bathroom. Snape pushed through the latter, sure of what he would find, and he was not surprised to see Black curled in an upright fetal position in an enormous tub of steaming water, like a shipwrecked child. The smaller man did not acknowledge Snape's entrance, did not cease the low cries tearing from his throat. Eyes red and raw from weeping gazed, unfocused, on the fixtures of the bathtub. The water, though slightly dim, was not murky enough to suggest that Black had washed.

Snape gave an exasperated snort and undid his robe perfunctorily, stepping out of it and turning to hang it on the ubiquitous back-of-the-door hook that every bathroom with a tub seemed to have, no matter whether the house were owned by a Wizard or a Muggle. Since he had had no shirt and his black wool trousers had been beyond repair, he was wearing only a pair of soft, flannel boxers, which someone had dug up for him from a drawer in the master bedroom. Sockless, he stood only in house slippers, also scavenged from the Muggle owners' wardrobe. He stepped out of them soundlessly, pulled a towel from the basket that hung suspended on a chain over the tub, and laid it out on the floor next to the tub, so that he might kneel in relative comfort.

Lowering himself gingerly, Snape reached out one hand for Black's near shoulder, his long fingers resting in an almost-caress against the bony protrusion of the animagus' collarbone. At his touch, the other man stilled and stopped his noise so suddenly that the room seemed unnaturally quiet. His head turned ponderously, as though swinging on some great counterweight, until his eyes anchored on Severus'.

"I heard—"

"I know. I told her."

"Oh. Is she—"

"No."

"Of course not. Stupid question."

Neither seemed to notice nor care that they were communicating in half-sentences. Neither gave a thought to what it might mean that they could say so little but mean so much.

"Why were you howling? Adding your voice to the pack, perhaps?" This said sardonically, but with a fondness, discernible only in the minutest proportion but still a present and living warmth.

"I'm just--. Harry, you know? I keep thinking that he's--. And then I want him to be dead if living means he's suffering, that they're torturing him--. I just can't..."

"Will you stop?" There was anger now, and impatience, and something that sounded suspiciously like a plea. "Wherever he is, there is nothing we can do, as you so chivalrously pointed out to me mere hours ago. Or have you forgotten how you begged me not to respond to the Dark Lord's call?"

Black's eyes widened, then narrowed, and he shrugged off Snape's hand violently.

"As if it were the braver thing to go to your certain death at the hands of Voldemort than to survive on scraps and shreds of hope out here on the edge of the world?" Black's tone suggested that the question was rhetorical.

"Oh, yes. And you were so worried about survival that you refused to flee what could have been a Death Eater attack, instead desiring some glorious final stand because you were 'tired of running,'—isn't that what you said, Black?" Snape's voice was so cold that Black visibly shivered.

"Maybe so, Snape. But at least I was willing to die fighting. You wanted to give up and return to your former master so that you could be his bitch." There was an edge of hysteria to the last word.

Black flinched at the look on Snape's face. The ex-Death Eater's next words were low and quiet, vibrating with barely suppressed hostility.

"Better his bitch than your master, Black."

Black lunged up unto his knees and reached for Snape, hands stretched to throttle the Potions Master, but Snape was much quicker, leaning back and standing up in a long, liquid wave of motion, until he was well out of the other wizard's grasping reach. Snape smirked, a dark, ugly smile that twisted his lips into a rictus, like the grin of a dead man. Then he said,

"Insecure, Sirius?" He used his lover's name like a whip, intending to hurt him. Black flinched again, gripped the edge of the tub so hard that his shoulders shook with the effort. He dropped his head, his wet hair obscuring his face. A sound came up, echoing from the tub and up into the room, a hollow, rasping wheeze that may have been a laugh.

"You're trying to piss me off, aren't you, you slick son-of-a-bitch? This is your sick idea of comfort, isn't it? Make me angry and I'll forget about Harry," his voice hitched, but he clenched his teeth and went on, "and all the death and how hopeless it all is. I'll focus on how much I hate you and not what this world has become, and then I won't grieve anymore, right?'

"Think what you will," intoned Snape, his voice indifferent. "Are you going to bathe, or must I do it for you?"

Black accepted the change in subject, just as he had accepted that their argument was finished, even if nothing had truly been resolved.

"Why don't you come in here with me?" he asked. There was no waver in his voice now.

Snape made an inelegant sound, which Sirius interpreted to mean that he would share the bath with Black but that he also knew a diversion when he heard it. He stepped smoothly out of the boxers, hanging them with the robe, and then stepped into the tub, which he was pleased to find offered plenty of room for them both. Not wanting the cold faucet digging into his back, he hooked one long arm over the edge of the tub to retrieve the towel he'd been using as a bathmat, doubling it and hanging it over the faucet, then leaning back, his elbows to either side of the tap's two handles.

Black was kneeling upright between Snape's bent knees, hands on either side of the tub, his thumbs making tiny, gentle circles on the outside dimple of each of Snape's knees. He looked at Snape for long, long moments without breaking eye contact. Finally, the animagus said,

"You're hurt," softly, reaching a tentative hand out to Snape's right shoulder, which sported a deep and swollen gash running from the point of his shoulder joint diagonally across his chest, ending in an oddly star-shaped puncture wound near his left nipple, as though he'd grown an extra one there.

Snape took the reaching hand and moved it to his left shoulder, instead, urging the man to lean forward, to come closer, as he did so. But Black was not to be distracted from the wound, which was bleeding slowly, drops congealing along the jagged edges of the cut and then joining with beaded sweat and bathwater to run in pale, pink streams down Snape's midline, toward the arrow of dark hair that disappeared into the water at his waist.

"How did you get this?" he persisted.

Snape shrugged, then winced as the motion pulled at the edges of the gash. "When I came up next to the dumpster in the back alley, I caught my shoulder on a piece of scrap metal that was caught under the lid. My momentum, however, carried me a good way onto the piece before I could stop myself, and by then it had pierced my breast." He seemed ready to shrug again but caught himself in time and gave a wry shake of his head, instead. "It was a foolish accident, nothing more."

Black stared at the injury for another long moment and then used Snape's good shoulder as support to rise up from the tub and step over the side.

"Leaving so soon? Is the great doggie hunter afraid of a little blood?"

"No, you git. I'm going to see if any of the others can heal that. I don't have many healing skills, and the ones I do have are mostly restoratives, not repair spells."

Snape narrowed his eyes thoughtfully and then said, "Look in the kitchen for rosemary, thyme, marjoram, or garlic. Though primitive, any of these can make a wash to cleanse the wound. As for closing it, I should think Albus would be the best at medi-wizardry. He told me once that he took two courses in his N.E.W.T. year and assisted the mediwitch in his own day, Madam Comfrey, in exchange for extra tutoring. If he can't do it, it may have to be cauterized the old-fashioned way."

Black's face reflected his horror, and he said, "Cauterized? Snape, that's barbaric! Gods, we haven't used that kind of medicine since—"

"I don't see that we have much choice, Sirius." Snape's rare use of his lover's first name persuaded the other wizard that he should accept Snape's good judgment in matters of healing. Turning once again towards the door, Black said, "I'm going to borrow this," putting aside Snape's boxers and taking Snape's robe off the door, he threw it about himself loosely and held it closed with one hand. "I won't be a minute."

Snape's cry of outrage was audible through the bathroom door, but Black ignored it.

*****

An embarrassing eternity later, Snape's wound had been gently bathed in a warm thyme wash and then closed by Albus' steady wand. The elder wizard had seemed even more embarrassed than said Potions Master to find himself hovering over a naked, wet Snape in the steamy master bath, a bath the two younger wizards had obviously been sharing, from the appearance of Sirius in the kitchen wearing nothing but Snape's robe and the trail of damp footprints that Dumbledore noticed on their way back up to the waiting Potions Master.

Black had asked him on the staircase, "How is Molly, Albus?"

Dumbledore had given a slow, sad shake of his head and said, "I spelled her to sleep for awhile, Sirius. The poor woman was hurting herself." His expression turned grim, then. "Severus didn't help matters any. He treated Molly disgracefully. I expected better from him. I know he has issues with the Weasley family, but the woman has just lost four of her children, and—"

"Albus, surely you know what Severus was doing?"

"What?" the elder wizard replied, clearly surprised by Black's interjection.

"He tried it with me, too. He made me angry so that I would focus on hating him rather than on my own sorrow. I'm sure that's what he was doing with Molly."

Albus gave Sirius a quizzical look that slowly transformed into something different—not a benign acknowledgement that what Sirius had said was true, but a piercing, probing gaze that suggested that Sirius had just revealed more about himself than about Snape.

"My boy," Albus began, a gravity in his voice that disconcerted the younger wizard, "You must be careful with Severus. He's not a man to be taken lightly. He is a Slytherin to the core. While he has proven himself capable of great sacrifices for the side of Light, he is still a man who keeps his own counsel. I do not believe that there is much he will willingly offer of himself." Dumbledore hesitated, and then said quietly and with deliberate care, "He is not Remus, Sirius."

Sirius stopped with one foot on the step above him and turned to look directly at the older wizard.

"I know that," he said. "Gods, Albus, don't you think I know that? It doesn't matter, Albus. Leave it. It doesn't matter." Sirius' tone was forbidding, not a warning against trespass but a slippery slope, down which it was too easy to slide. It said that he knew what he had lost when Lupin had died, and he knew the man he now kept company with.

Albus had merely nodded and gave the animagus' shoulder a gentle squeeze suggestive of support.

*****

Sirius could still feel a phantom of that support as he turned from closing the door behind Albus and looked once again directly at his lover.

Snape was leaning back against the end of the tub opposite the faucet, eyes closed, face still. He seemed to be asleep, but Black knew better. Black watched Snape for minutes that stretched out in the quiet room and settled on him, leaving him powerless to cross the short space to the tub's edge. He wanted to crawl into the water, to hold and be held, but he was no longer sure of his reception. Snape looked exhausted, no—something beyond exhaustion. He looks like he's taken the Draught of Living Death, Black thought.

A silky voice interrupted his thoughts, "Are you going to join me and get clear of that filth, or would you rather just stare at me until the filth learns a language, colonizes, and stages a coup?"

Black, flustered at being caught staring at Snape, quickly divested himself of Snape's borrowed robe, returning it to the hook from whence it came, this time over the boxers. He strode purposefully toward the tub, hoping that his legs weren't visibly shaking, and stepped into the water. It was only lukewarm.

"Aren't you cold?" Black asked, turning towards the faucet handles.

"Yes." The voice was a symphony of weariness.

Black tipped the stopper to drain some of the tepid water and turned on the hot water, moving it back toward Snape's prone position with his hands, creating an informal whirlpool.

Snape purred. It was the sexiest thing that Black had ever heard, and he felt himself getting hard. Hoping that Snape would keep his eyes closed, he knelt in the rapidly warming water and retrieved from its shelf beside the tub a plastic pitcher, the sole purpose of which seemed to be for dousing one's head when shampooing. He dipped it into the water, re-stoppering the tub and shutting off the taps as he did so, and then moved toward Snape on his knees.

"I'm going to wash your hair."

Another purr, this one more noticeably affirmative.

Black poured the water slowly, cradling the back of Snape's skull with one hand and pulling his head toward himself, away from the edge of the tub where it had been resting. This time, Black felt the purr reverberating through the skull beneath his hand. He smiled a secretive little smile and felt a telltale twitch beneath the cover of the water.

Exchanging the pitcher for a bottle of Muggle shampoo, Black squeezed some of the thick, fragrant gel out onto his hands, rubbed them together, and then threaded his fingers gently through Snape's hair, massaging the scalp with his fingertips and taking care that the shampoo reached even to the very ends of the heavy mass. Gently untangling a knot, focused on not hurting the other man, Black was surprised to feel lips against his chest, a tongue lapping the trickles of water that ran from the hollow of his throat down to his sternum. It was Black's turn to purr.

Snape gave an evil little laugh and said, "I thought you were supposed to growl, Black."

Black uttered a short, bark-like laugh and went back to enjoying his lover's ministrations.

By the time Snape's hair had been thoroughly lathered and then rinsed, Snape had been suckling one or the other of Black's nipples for several minutes, and Black was frantic to be done with the task of cleaning one another so that they might move to more—interesting—pursuits. Snape, however, was not in the mood for haste, as was apparent when he handed Black a bar of lavender- and rosemary-scented soap and said, "Will you?" in a voice like liquid desire. Black trembled, nearly dropping the soap, and then recovered himself enough to say, "Here, let's switch places."

After a moment or two of awkwardness, punctuated by Snape's comment, "Perhaps you're more graceful in dog form?" they managed to position themselves so that Snape was resting in the cradle of Black's spread legs, his back to Black. Snape draped his long arms over Black's bent knees, the crook of his elbows against the bones of the knee joints, his long forearms covering Black's shins, his long fingers caressing the top of Black's feet between the water. It was almost unbearably intimate, and Black shuddered with both longing and trepidation. He felt trapped for a moment, realizing even as he identified the feeling that it was ridiculous. After all, he was the one with his arms around Snape, rubbing soap in gently, lazy circles along Snape's throat, his collarbone, his breasts, his belly, down his abdomen until he felt the brush of water-softened curls against his knuckles. Snape made a breathless little noise, somewhere between a sign and a moan, and threw his head back to rest against Sirius' right shoulder. Taking it as the invitation it was, Sirius ran his soap-slickened fingers along Snape's swollen shaft, washing but also exploring. Sliding his fingers down to the base of Snape's cock, Black reached forward enough to roll Snape's balls in his fist, cleaning first one and then the other, then further back, along the soft skin of the perineum, and then to the puckered opening that caused Snape to gasp and move his head restlessly against Black's shoulder as the man explored.

With a knowing smile, Black took his free hand and ran it along Snape's backbone, down the crevice of his body and into the space between Snape's buttocks and Sirius' groin. Here, he met his own hand in its busy work around and in Snape's hole, and Snape ceased all movement, all breathing, seeming to hang suspended just there, on the cradle of Black's joined hands, joined fingers, even though the two men were touching down the length of their bodies.

"Sirius," Snape said raggedly.

Black, a smug smile in his voice, said, "Yes, Severus?"

"Are you going to fuck me or play with yourself all night?"

Black chuckled, paused as though pondering the question, and then lifted the limp man up with those two joined hands, just a little, just enough to deepen his fingers' penetration and put pressure on his prostate. Snape's groan was loud in the echoing chamber.

"I thought you wanted to be on top?" Black said, the smirk still wholly evident in his voice.

"I am," Snape pointed out, his voice languid with growing pleasure.

"You know what I mean," the other man admonished teasingly.

"Yessss..." Snape said, his sibilance a promise.

Black heard the promise, moved both of his hands free of Snape's temptingly pliant body, and helped Snape to sit up and forward, in a deep squat. Then, having soaped himself as best he could under water, Black guided Snape back onto his erect cock. Snape sunk slowly, Black firming his grip on the Potion Master's hips to prevent the other man from impaling himself too deeply, too quickly. Snape settled gently against Black with a groan, gasping "Gods" under his breath as he took the whole length of Black. Black, finding purchase with his knees against the edge of the tub, above the water line, thrust upward carefully, and Snape gasped again, this time louder, a distinct, "Yessss."

Black was enthralled by the sight of Severus Snape, head thrown forward onto his own chest, wet hair a fall of darkness around his face, the long, long line of his back arching up. He licked along Snape's spine and, trusting that Snape could regulate his own movement now, removed one hand from his lover's hip and reached around to stroke Snape's long, hard, silky, wet cock. Snape threw his head back, a moan rising up from deep in his belly, vibrating around Black's engulfed cock and through the tub, so that it resonated across the water, off the walls of the room, enveloping them in a sound of pure, dark animal desire.

Sirius thrust harder now and Severus met him, riding him with increasing frenzy, both of them grunting now, the water splashing up violently around them as they rocked and groaned and growled and panted in the thick, steamy air of the bathroom. Black's hand on Snape's cock was relentless, pulling the man forward, up, higher toward the brink of something that shimmered just out of his grasp, until Black himself felt the overwhelming rise within him, and he thrust up harder still, head thrown back, a growl of complete abandon leaving his throat in a long, deep sound, and when he growled, he felt Snape convulse against his hand, felt the hotter fluid leave Snape's body, and came himself, howling now, again, not from grief this time, nor anger, nor sorrow, but with the sheer, mindless and unadulterated joy of release, bursting over them both, leaving them limp and ragged-breathed, the water sloshing and then slowly stilling to vibrations with their panting.

Snape's hands left the tubsides and splashed into the water before him. He gently levered himself up, Black sliding easily from his body. Snape gave a low moan of loss as they separated, and Black found energy enough for a breathy chuckle.

"What?" snapped Snape, but there was no power or real anger behind the word.

"It's just that we haven't really gotten the hang of this bathing thing yet, have we? I still haven't properly washed, and you need to wash again."

"Bugger washing." Snape stood up, stumbled from the tub on legs still sex-weak and uncertain, retrieved his wand from the robe on the door, muttered an incantation, and was suddenly clean and dry. Even his hair was falling in dry, airy waves around his face. He made a questioning gesture towards Sirius, who stood up and got out of the tub as quickly as he could, given that he was still dizzy with orgasm. Snape repeated the incantations for cleaning and drying, then reached out one hand toward Black.

Black took it, touched by Severus' tender gesture, and followed the other man through the door and into the master bedroom. Without letting go of Sirius' hand, Severus turned down the fluffy down comforter and flannel sheets, then ushered Black into the bed ahead of him. Black settled on his side, back to Snape, and Snape spooned his tall body around him, insinuating one long, long thigh between Black's two.

Black thought he felt the ghost of a kiss behind his ear, but he was never certain because sleep rose up to claim him at that moment. Consequently, he never heard Snape breathe, "Good night, Sirius," into his hair, nor feel him ghost a kiss across his cheek.


End file.
